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MellowTigger writes "I work at a non-profit organization. I am looking for a site where we can register an account under our group's name, then spawn multiple projects to solicit programmer help for our organization. The current projects that we have in mind are small and probably not of interest to the wider world, although one very large project is possible. I need a site that emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor rather than the wider world, since most projects are so specific that wider applicability seems slim. We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and SQL. At the moment, my available options emphasize individual projects of public interest, so we would have to spawn multiple independent projects, seeming to spam the host with 'pointless' minor tasks. We already have technical people seeking to donate time. We just need a way to coordinate skill matching, document sharing, and code submission out on the web. What do you suggest?"

I'm not sure about that. I haven't seen any projects that were related on GitHub. There are forks and such but I haven't seen one "site" that says here's our twenty different projects and how they fit in to the bigger solution. GitHub would be a great place for the individual project repos to live though.

I'd suggest assuming your non-profit has a website already put it there. Say in your volunteers wanted section just have a "Do you know how to program? Would you like to work on a project that will help us?

Your screen has a background consisting of a diffuser element, several lamps (probably cold-cathode, though there are other possibilities), and an opaque backing sheet incorporating the structural support and protection for your screen.

You could get rid of all of those, rendering your screen transparent except for the switched-on pixels. The screen would then be almost completely fucking useless except for posing in front of in shit movies.

Wow, could you possibly be more of a fucking asshole? Go fuck yourself.

You seem to have answered you own question.Could he be more into having anal intercourse? Why yes, one way would be if he were able to penetrate his own sphincter.Exactly why you jump to that somewhat far-fetched method instead of somewhat more conventional means (i.e. utilizing a partner) remains a mystery.Fact remains that the method you yourself provide would be a valid, though somewhat unplausible, answer to the stated question.

No, the geeks aren't that lazy, just the posers. I mean after all he said " We would need help with various technologies including at least Powershell and SQL.", what's nerdy about that, what he needs is some script-kiddies.

I like how the poster is super vague. What custom software does a non-profit need, that not written like 100 times. The lack of knowledge about github simply shows... not very technical and about to reinvent the wheel.

I run it for my own personal projects, and it works good for me. Its not incredibly fancy but it does work for what its designed to do, which is assign people to projects, tracks commits, and lets you see diffs, etc. I don't know if you need some of the bells and whistles these other sites offer or not. It does require setup, and running your own server/instance/whatever to have it on. The only hiccup I've ever ran into (which was due to how git works) was when someone committed a 1.5gb psd file to a repo and we ran out of memory on the small instance indefero was running on.

He's identified a big problem in current infrastructure, which has him forked. Projects are standalone, and he wants to start multiple projects. Starting multiple projects will look like spamming to a great many people, but A) he doesn't want to spam; and B) he doesn't want to be seen to spam.

He wants something that doesn't seem to exist at the moment, and many of the denizens of/. seem to prefer to insult him for not just believing that t

The reason why most people here are rolling their eyes (or insulting) is because it is already solved. The problem is well understood; a few terms to feed to google: git, git-submodule, github, github organisation, gitosis, gitweb, mercurial

If you are making the repositories public, GitHub is the way to go. You only have to pay if the repositories are private. It gives you the ability for people to send pull requests for changes (which you can choose to accept), issue tracking, etc. The pull request system is really nice, because you ultimately have control of what gets pulled into your project, but anyone can pull it down. It's pretty much the standard hosting, and works across all platforms.

GitHub has been great for us. The code management system makes collaboration and code control very intuitive. They have discounted packages for academic use, where the "micro" package (at a minimum) has 5 private repos free of charge. You could check to see if they have something similar for nonprofits generally.

Set up a slackware server (can even be on high-end workstation class hardware as long as you have a UPS powering it) running SVN Server and apache. There are plenty of good browser based CMS packages available. I like Drupal + Storm, but that's just me. If SQL Server is an absolute requirement, rather than MySQL, set up each developer's workstation with SQL Server Express. TortoiseSVN is a great Windows SVN client that may be easier to set up than git. Using github gives you the advantage of a decentra

I hope that the OP doesn't expect programmers to flock to support his project, just because it is present on a social coding site.

They won't. Probably not a single one. Even if he uses the most popular host providing such services, GitHub.

For the most part, there is no contribution whatsoever, unless the contributor has some stake. The most successful GitHub projects are those that have some kind of corporate sponsorship, and you have several big companies contributing one or more full-time employees to the project.

Beyond that, you might get some contribution to the project if a lot of people are using it, and some of them modify it to suit their own needs, and either they altruisticlly contribute their modifications back(not common), or (more commonly) by contributing back they absolve themselves of having to maintain their own separate fork.

For projects with, say, 100-200 watchers (which probably means 10X that many users), it's typical to get maybe a pull request or two per year.

So, hopefully the OP has some volunteers lined-up already, or knows where to find them. They aren't going to appear out of nowhere.

I think it would be silly to set-up your own server for this. GitHub is the goto place today. It has a good-enough Issues system that is well integrated with code management, and makes it easy to publish documentation.

I hope that the OP doesn't expect programmers to flock to support his project, just because it is present on a social coding site.

Indeed. It doesn't sound promising based on his posting. I get the impression that he expects to be able to sit back and manage ("coordinate skill set matching"?) flocking programmers. And there's this air of secretiveness -- what NPO are we talking about, and what are the projects? And there's the "emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor" part which also is a major turn-off.
Who ever heard of volunteer programmers working on something they can't use themselves? There's no itch to scratch.

I think it would be silly to set-up your own server for this. GitHub is the goto place today. It has a good-enough Issues system that is well integrated with code management, and makes it easy to publish documentation.

Well if they are small enough projects (say the typical LOB crap that 90% of devs work on for companies) they might get knocked off by someone that likes the charity AND has another reason. I agree with this general thread people contribute because they have a need for the project generally. If it is useful enough a corporate entity might start using it in their products and then have to do some modification to make it more useful. Some of those will be nice enough to give the mods back. The OP is pretty a

Freepository [freepository.com] is a reliable solution if you are willing to shell out some cash. I think they stopped their free offering sometime back, but plans start from $9/month if your contributers are limited in number.

Freepository is a reliable solution if you are willing to shell out some cash. I think they stopped their free offering sometime back, but plans start from $9/month if your contributers are limited in number.

Perhaps in light of not being free, they should change their prefix. Might I recommend "sup". It's short for supported.:-D

If you could get somewhere to host it GForge [gforgegroup.com] would seem to fit what I think you're asking. It'd be similar to in effect to running your own "sourceforge" and then hosting each application on that.

Sadly the free/open source version seems to be defunct now from what I can see but the company who do the commercial version seem to offer free licences for non-profits so it might still be an option.

BitBucket [bitbucket.org] has a better pricing model for what you are trying to do. Free for up to ten users, which includes unlimited private repos.

Anything public is probably better hosted at GitHub, as people are more used to using stuff from there - the pricing is not too bad, but is per-repository so if you have a bunch of small things it could start to get expensive.

Initially I read: "Ask Slashdot: Where to Host Many Small, Retarded Projects?" and thought "This is an interesting question".
Then I read it correctly and thought "That first question made more sense".
Anyway, I digress, Github of course.

This shows there is one of two problems that need to bee addressed before asking for development help:

current projects that we have in mind are small and probably not of interest to the wider world, although one very large project is possible. I need a site that emphasizes our non-profit as the benefactor rather than the wider world, since most projects are so specific that wider applicability seems slim.

If it's not of interest to the wider world, you'll not get developers coming to help, with a possible exception being if the organization is extremely well known, like Red Cross. However, if it's that specific, probably either a) the problem has been too narrowly defined or b) it's not a development project, but a find-and-configure project.

I am currently working on a non-profit project hosted at Launchpad.Net. Although it is a large ERP-size project instead of several small projects, I don't see why it wouldn't work for you.
Of course, as other posters have pointed out, exposing the source is only one part of successfully running open projects.